“We’re going to the medical wing.” His voice sounded thin and unnatural. It was probably being threaded through an old-fashioned filter instead of a comm unit.
“Does it have decontamination equipment?”
“I don’t…um…no.” Obviously he checked as he was answering her.
“Then take me to the ship’s decon unit. You have one, right?” Ships that did business in Earth Alliance were required by law to have up-to-date decontamination units. Ships that went outside the Alliance, to unprotected worlds, had to have even more sophisticated units.
But she wasn’t sure about cargo ships or criminal vessels.
“I was told to take you to the medical unit.”
At least from his response, she knew she had the bulky assistant, not the Recovery Man.
“And I’m telling you to take me to decon first. That should handle half of these contaminants without any need for medical intervention.”
“I don’t take orders from you.”
“You should,” she said. “I at least would never have put your health at risk. This entire ship is probably filled with contaminants. If you two go in and out of the cargo holds all the time, then you’re tracking stuff all over the ship.”
He waved one arm, a gesture of futility, or maybe it was an order to get moving. She couldn’t tell. She could tell that she had riled him.
He hadn’t moved from the doorway. Then he nodded once. He had obviously communicated with the Recovery Man.
“It’s down the hall,” he said. “The lights’ll guide you.”
As he spoke, floor lighting glowed green in front of her, pointing her away from him.
“You’re not coming with me?” she asked.
“I’ll be keeping an eye on you,” he said in a way that made her wonder if he really was. He was probably a lot more worried about what she had just told him, that the entire ship was contaminated.
What he didn’t know was that a simple containter ʼbot should be able to get rid of the worst of it. Tracking the stuff simply meant that low levels were scattered throughout the ship. The cargo holds were the worst because they had the contaminated materials for longer periods of time. Some of the materials probably leaked, some gave off radiation, and others probably just ruined the areas that they touched.
But that was enough.
What amazed her the most was that nothing had exploded yet—and that no Port had caught the lethality of these holds. Most Ports probably didn’t inspect thoroughly. Or else this Recovery Man had permits that prevented a thorough inspection.
Or he went to Ports that did no inspections at all.
She hurried down the hall, following the green lights but keeping her eyes open. She looked for three things: escape pods, portals that might tell her where she was, and computer controls that would give her access to the bridge.
Most ships had backup controls somewhere in the cargo areas, just so that emergencies could be dealt with. If these controls gave her access to automatic pilot, she might have a chance to save herself.
She could take over the ship, let it fly itself, and contact the nearest Alliance base.
But so far, she saw nothing. The walls were uniform gray metal. If there were emergency panels, they were well covered. Same with entrances to pods.
Although there might not be any in this section. She had a hunch she was in the center of the ship, with no exterior walls at all. She’d probably have a better chance near the decon unit.
She glanced over her shoulder. The minion in the environmental suit hadn’t followed her. She could go any direction she wanted.
The problem was that she really wanted to get to the decon unit. It would take care of the worst of the contaminants—the stuff that really threatened her at the moment, the stuff making her woozy. The rest could be handled at a medical facility, whether one inside the ship or one on some base somewhere, and not immediately.
If she didn’t take care of some of this stuff immediately, she would become too sick to escape.
She had to be practical, much as she hated it.
She rounded another corner. Yellow warning signs covered one door. Most of the markings were in a language she didn’t recognize.
She sent an image and a query along her links for translation, but got no response. Apparently they were too far out for her to link into any network.
Or this part of the ship was quarantined.
Which meant that the Recovery Man was thinking, even if his partner wasn’t.
She followed the green lights past another corner, and to signs she recognized: the Alliance symbols for airlock and exit. It made sense that the decon unit would be near an exit, probably one of the main exits on the entire ship.
The unit was as obvious as the signs. It was tall and square and state-of-the-art, which relieved her.
It also made sense to her.
Recovery Men traveled all over the known universe, finding things of questionable provenance. They’d want equipment to keep them as healthy as possible.
She checked the exterior of the unit to make sure it was running properly. Then she stuck one hand inside, and the entire machine gave off squeals and beeps. Lights flashed, warning sirens sounded.
At least the warning equipment worked.
She hoped the rest of it would.
She couldn’t read the instructions—they weren’t in any language she knew—so she stepped inside fully clothed.
As the door closed behind her, she hoped she hadn’t made a terrible mistake.
Fourteen
The first cop to show up was dumpy. He looked more like security for Aleyd than a police officer. Talia made him press his ID into House’s system twice before she let him in.
The guy walked in, gave her this look like he thought she was making everything up, and then picked up her mom’s favorite fist-sized sculpture of the Moon. It sat on an end table, and nobody, but nobody, was supposed to touch that glass ball.
Talia swallowed back the words she wanted to say. Instead, she said, “In case you were wondering, the kidnappers are gone. But I have a lump on the back of my head, and House can show you some footage of what happened, plus House has audio of my mom’s kidnapping.”
But the cop didn’t say anything. He just set the Moon sculpture down and went straight for the kitchen.
Talia squared her shoulders. She knew they’d find the holo, but she wanted to introduce it.
Instead, he was standing in front of it, the words, Sixty thousand Gyonnese have paid with their futures. How has Rhonda Flint paid? scrolling across the screen.
“Who is Rhonda Flint?” he asked.
“My mom.”
“I thought you reported a Rhonda Shinto missing.”
“Shindo,” Talia said, knowing her tone was veering into the sarcastic and trying to stop it. “Her last name is Shindo. But she used to be Rhonda Flint.”
“What is she, a Disappeared?”
“No,” Talia snapped. She’d had enough of grown-ups thinking she didn’t know what she was talking about. “She’s a divorced.”
He blinked at her, then frowned, then half nodded as he understood. “Old-fashioned, huh?”
“She took his name.” This time, Talia sounded defensive.
“But you’re Shinto too.”
She had a hunch he’d mispronounced that on purpose.
“Yeah,” Talia said. “We both changed it.”
“Poor guy.” The cop stuck his thumbs in his belt, then looked at the holo. “You make that?”
“Are you kidding?” Talia said. “The guy that took her made it.”
This time, the cop gave her a slow sideways look. “Where did he get the time to do that?”
“After he knocked me out and locked me in my closet,” she said.
“Why didn’t he take you?”
She wasn’t about to give him the real answer, even though she felt like it flared across her forehead: Clone. Not an original. Fake. Fake child. No, they’d ca
lled it false. False child.
“He wanted her,” she said.
“Seems like a lot of trouble to go to—”
“House,” she said. “Show him the Recovery Man.”
An image rose between the cop and the holo. It was an image of the Recovery Man making the holo. The cop squinted at it.
“Recovery Man,” he repeated.
“That’s what he called himself,” Talia said.
“Not a Retrieval Artist?’
“No,” she said.
“Or a Tracker?”
“I know the difference,” she said. “I’m not six.”
He nodded, no longer paying attention to her. “Have your House show me the rest of what you have.”
House did, and played the audio. But he was only partway through it when he got that stare people got when they sent messages along their links. By the time the audio finished, two more cops in uniform arrived, and moments after that, two men in normal clothes.
One of them, a slender young guy with high cheekbones and greenish-gray eyes, took Talia by the arm. “I’m Detective Dowd Bozeman. I’m the lead on this case. This is my partner, Detective Iniko Zagrando. We watched the holo and heard the audio on the way over.”
Apparently the cop had sent it to them.
“Had you seen these men before?” Bozeman asked.
The other detective came over. He was older, and Talia thought it strange he wasn’t in charge. But his face was lined, like he couldn’t afford enhancements, and his eyes had deep circles under them. She wondered if he was sick.
“No,” Talia said. “I’d never seen them.”
“Not looking at the house, not around your school, not—?”
“No.” She rubbed her hands on her legs, then saw one of the other cops reaching for the holo. “Don’t do that!”
He stopped, hand near the image.
“Didn’t you look at the vid? This guy didn’t know what he was doing. It might be set up wrong. The door is too hot.”
All of the cops looked at each other. Then the first guy put a hand to his ear, and she realized he was sending more messages.
“Good catch,” Detective Zagrando said to her. “You were lucky to get away from those guys.”
“I didn’t get away from them.” Her voice wobbled. She made herself take a deep breath. “They got me, but they didn’t want me.”
“Do you know what they were talking to your mother about?”
“I heard the whole thing same as you.”
“No.” Zagrando swept his hand toward the holoimage on the door. “Do you know about that?”
She shook her head. A lump had risen in her throat. This was as bad as Mom said it would be. Maybe worse. No one would listen to her. No one cared.
“Mom said that someday strangers might come for her. She said that if they did, she might vanish, and then I was to—”
Talia stopped herself. She didn’t want them to know she’d waited to contact them, that she’d tried the Moon lawyer first.
“To what, Talia?” Bozeman asked.
“To not do anything, because she’d be back. She didn’t want to lose the house.”
Everyone in the room nodded. They all understood the harsh housing policies in Valhalla Basin.
“Do you have family you can stay with?” Bozeman asked.
Talia shook her head as the Recovery Man’s words ran through it. There are five others out there. Five more Talias. Would they be considered family?
Bozeman nodded toward one of the other cops, who nodded back. Talia knew that was some kind of code.
He took her arm. “Show me how you got out of that closet.”
His voice was gentle. He led her away from the holoimage. She wanted to shake her arm from his grip, but she didn’t. Even though she was angry at these people for not listening to her, she was glad they were here. She was glad someone was here.
She didn’t want to be alone.
Fifteen
Never in all her years as a lawyer had Celestine Gonzalez received a reprimand like the one that Martin Oberholst had just given her. The old man, who had always been sweet and somewhat charming to her, had called her foul names. He had told her that she had made the worst mistake of her career, and he warned her that she’d have no career if she didn’t make everything right.
All over a thirteen-year-old girl whose name wasn’t even in their files. It wasn’t until young Talia Shindo mentioned her mother Rhonda that Gonzalez could even find a relevant case name in the firm’s entire database.
By then, the girl was angry, the intersystem connection poor, and Gonzalez was panicked. She tried to mollify the child but couldn’t, and the girl severed the connection, either refusing to respond to further contacts or not receiving them.
Oberholst, Martinez, and Mlsnavek hadn’t made its reputation by losing track of clients. Gonzalez had risen to junior partner, and had been in line for a senior partnership until that afternoon.
Now she had only one chance to make everything up to the firm, and she was going to do so.
She stood in the secondary office suite on the company yacht and sorted files on the large screen before her. The files seemed to have no end. Martin Oberholst had handled this case personally, and he had made promises that no one should make to a client who was about to leave the Moon.
Gonzalez’s hands shook. She’d never left the Moon before, not really. Like everyone else, she’d taken orbital rides and had even gone to off-Moon hotels—inside Moon space, of course. But she hadn’t left the Moon to go anywhere else in the solar system. She hadn’t even been to Earth, which was the post-graduation trip of most lawyers she knew, and she certainly hadn’t been anywhere near Jupiter.
Flying made her nervous. All the decontamination this and the preparation that. The instruction on the environmental suits and the escape pods and the information that one could give authorities outside the Earth Alliance. Her head spun from all of it.
And it all stemmed from that frightened teenage voice.
Which shook her up worse.
The memory of that girl’s terrified voice, the way that she’d tried to let bravado take the place of courage. The girl had been through hell, and Gonzalez had treated her like a criminal who had wandered into the law offices by mistake.
No wonder Oberholst himself insisted on coming on this trip. He was twenty years older than humans had a right to be, and he still practiced law when he could. He had no stamina at all, despite the treatments he received. Other partners guessed that every medical procedure, every insertion of a nanobot, every enhancement, only made the old man live longer, not grow stronger.
But his brain hadn’t quit, and his brain had produced all that harsh invective to add to the invective she’d come up with on her own.
Going to Valhalla Basin, even though she didn’t have a license to practice there, had been Gonzalez’s idea. Having someone with an Earth Alliance-spanning license accompany her had also been her idea.
But she had wanted someone younger and more vigorous than Oberholst. Having him come along had most certainly been his idea, an idea that no one in the firm had been able to talk him out of.
He was resting in his suite, which included the main office and several rooms besides the captain’s chamber. His entire medical team had come along, as had another senior partner, who also had an Alliance-spanning license, just in case (apparently) the old man finally lost his fight with mortality on this trip.
Which would be just what Gonzalez needed.
She sighed, then sank back into the real leather chair that someone had bolted to the floor in the center of the room. She had to calm down. She needed to think clearly.
The issue was the girl, not whether Oberholst would live. Not even Gonzalez’s career.
What she had learned so far was that Rhonda Flint—Rhonda Shindo—was paying a hefty retainer every year to maintain her exclusive relationship with Oberholst, Martinez, and Mlsnavek for just this contingency—the idea t
hat something would happen to her, and her daughter — her daughters—might need help.
If Gonzalez’s terrible reaction had a negative impact on Talia Shindo or got Rhonda Shindo killed or, heaven forbid, got them both killed, then the entire firm would be open to a substantial lawsuit from the estate. And, as Oberholst shouted at her, Oberholst, Martinez, and Mlsnavek would have to pay full damages in that suit.
They’d been retained to do three things: protect the daughters at all costs; keep Rhonda Shindo’s good relationship with Aleyd; and defend Rhonda Shindo, her estate, and heirs, from any damages stemming from an incident that Gonzalez did not have permission to view, the precipitating incident that Oberholst and the other senior partner, Siobhan Martinez, would handle should it become relevant.
Gonzalez scrolled through the initial files, not understanding most of the science involved in the claims. She was going to handle the Talia Shindo case, so long as she did not do anything that would hurt the three priorities in the Shindo/Flint case file.
Martinez would handle any confidential materials, and Oberholst was on hand to prevent even worse disasters, whatever they might be.
Gonzalez had no idea what she was walking into. All she knew was that a thirteen-year-old girl’s mother had been kidnapped, and she needed to protect that child from her mother’s employers.
Which seemed strange enough. But there was more here, a lot more, and she wished someone would let her know what it was.
She’d worked cases half-blind before, and she was never as effective as she was when she knew all the details.
She had already screwed this up once. She was terrified of doing so again.
Sixteen
Flint’s office was exactly the way he’d left it—a mess. In the past, his office had always been his haven, neat to a fault, his old partner, Noelle DeRicci, used to say, but he’d always felt that a disordered office was the sign of a disordered mind.
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